Youth Poetry

To encourage poetry writing among our state's youth, the Laureate's website highlights noteworthy poems written by those age eighteen and under. My goal is to demonstrate that poetry is an art form hospitable to the young. It answers their need to reflect on life's experiences and gives meaning and order to these events. Doing so, young people discover not only the language to express their thoughts and emotions but also the pleasures of language itself.

Writing a poem, then, becomes a means for the young to learn equally notions of selfhood and modes of language that express and thus define them. As added benefit, we adults are privy to what the young have to say and how they say it. We thereby deepen our understanding of the range of challenges children face in the contemporary world.

Indian Creek High School (2010)

Stone Academy (2009)

Poetic License, Inc. Workshop (www.poeticlicenseinc.net)(2009) Poems written in connection with a reading of the Holocaust YA novel, Behind the Bedroom Wall, written by Laura E. Williams. The assignment asked students to personify in a poem an emotion likely felt by one of the novel's characters.